SSD Fetish

Some preliminary info from Anandtech: "I've been hearing more reports of dying Samsung SSD 840 Pros and I believe I know the cause (firmware related, should be fixed in the latest shipping revision) but I'm still waiting for confirmation on one last thing before explaining what's going on there."

Most painless drive upgrade ever. The 830 came with a nice little USB connector to plug it in with. I installed the Ghost 15 software that came with it, and copied the two partitions over. Booted perfectly, and it's a smidge faster than what I had in there. I did have to manually go in and expand the partition to fill the rest of the drive, but that took 10-seconds.

Went from a Crucial CT128M255 to the Samsung 830. The Crucial was already faster than my spinning drives. The 830 is insane. Didn't notice I bought the basic model though, so no Ghost. Managed to get the data cloned, then had to use gparted to fix the alignment, and then had to buy a DVD drive so I could fix the Windows boot setup. Blah.

The 335 should have shipped with firmware that set this value to 3000 cycles, but someone forgot to set the variable to the right value in the firmware code. Woops. As a result, the MWI value on the 335 decreases at 2x the rate it should. This doesn't mean the drive is wearing out twice as fast as it should, just that the MWI data is inaccurate. Take our numbers from the 335 review and double them to get how long the 335 may last.

Hey guys, long time trader from the Agora, and lurker of all the other threads. I'm new to the SSD scene and thought this would be a good place for a question and/or advice. Last month I bought a Crucial M4 512Gb SSD to replace my WD Black Edition in my MacBook, and I've been very happy with the performance. I chose the M4 based on the positive reviews and I have bought their memory for years, so naturally I go with Crucial. I also have a 2011 Mac Mini i5 I want to upgrade, and nearly pulled the trigger on another M4 couple weeks ago, but I've been reading about Apple's new Fusion setup, and then the other day MacWorld.com posted an article on how to setup Fusion on your own. Now I'm scratching my head, is a Fusion setup better performance wise, or should I stay with another M4? The MacWorld article in question used a OWC 240Gb SSD for the demo thats priced at $295, yet for $100 more I can get Crucial's M4 at more than double the storage 512Gb. Thanks in advance for any advice you guys might have.

I doubt utilizing Fusion would be faster than a single SSD, since some data will reside on a spinny disk. However it was created to address the relatively low densities of pure SSD systems and the complexity of maintaining two discrete volumes. If space is a concern with a single SSD, Fusion appears to be a good option. If you can fit everything you want onto a SSD, or you don't mind maintaining two different volumes then you can probably skip it.

Just fitted two of my fleet with mSATA drives from Crucial. Both are on Intel DH61AG boards. One is a 32GB Crucial M4, the other is a 64GB M4. Both work well, and benchmark almost identically to the SATA M4 they're replacing.

Are there any good SSDs out there that have on-board or hardware encryption? This would be useful to me for laptops.

Be aware that on-board encryption might not do what you think it does--if the controller has access to the key, then the "encrypted" NAND chips will always be readable by the controller. The encryption only comes into play if someone pops the NAND chips off and tries to read them directly. This kind of encryption is also used by some SSD controllers to do a fast secure erase--they forget the key, and boom, everything's securely gone.

Crucial M4s still price out Ok, but their 128 is ~$85 so still not as nice as some recent sales.

Listen, sonny, you don't know how good you have it! I remember buying 240GB Vertex 2 drives for $450 and thinking that was a great deal!

Vector pricing is kinda high. I was hoping $350 would become the new norm for 512GB drives from everyone, not just occasional M4 sales. Samsung and OCZ are still keeping those high, and Intel's not really in the game at that capacity level.

Vector pricing is kinda high. I was hoping $350 would become the new norm for 512GB drives from everyone, not just occasional M4 sales. Samsung and OCZ are still keeping those high, and Intel's not really in the game at that capacity level.

It was on sale, but I just picked up a 480GB Intel 520 for 350$, fwiw.

There certainly is contrast between the $69.99 128GB Samsung 830s that I bought just a couple of weeks ago versus $129.99 for that same drive at Newegg today.

Crucial M4s still price out Ok, but their 128 is ~$85 so still not as nice as some recent sales.

Considering that it looks like Samsung is replacing the 830 with the 840 you are going to see prices rise as inventory levels drop since it appears that the 830 is more comparable to the 840 Pro, not the standard 840.

I thought I was taking a big risk by buy four 128GB 830s (for a total of a little under $300) just a couple of weeks before the awesome Black Friday deals.

Turns out I probably should have picked up a couple more.

I will say that someplace during the BF mess I saw a 128GB SSD for $59.99; I'm pretty sure it was a SanDisk, or maybe a Kingston (I mentally filter any and all OCZ products out these days, so I know it wasn't one of theirs).

Just got a Samsung 830 SSD and it comes with some software called Magician.

Supposedly this takes care of the TRIM stuff as well as other conditioning, trash removal etc.

I guess that's what it's doing when you select optimization, right?

Also, Win7 superfetch recommended to disable, along with indexing and of course, defrag. I forgot the technical reason for this.

The appropriate steps for setting up a system with a non-shitty SSD (the Samsung 830 falls into that category) for optimal performance are:

Install OS, drivers, apps, etc.

Use computer.

Windows 7 handles TRIM by itself. It disables defrag on SSDs automatically. You don't want to manually disable it because then any spinning disks in your system won't get defragged. There's no reason to disable indexing or Superfetch, and there are plenty of reasons not to (instant search won't work, accessing frequently used data on spinning disks will be slower, and so on).

The only things that might be useful, if you have a smaller SSD, a lot of RAM, and need more free space, are to disable hibernation and reduce the size of (but not disable) the page file.

Wow, I popped back into this thread wanting the answer to this same question, and almost immediately found this. This may be the best info in this thread. I just got the Samsung 830 and I will be putting it in a brand new build shortly. Then, I started nosing around the web looking for info on using an SSD for the boot drive (which I have never done before) and what I saw was giving me a huge headache. There are pages and pages about all these steps that you are "supposed to do", like disabling the cache, disabling indexing, disabling system restore, and other assorted crap that I really don't want to mess with if it isn't necessary.

This is much more appealing to me:

Install OS, drivers, apps, etc.

Use computer.

I guess the one catch would be to make sure the Bios is set for AHCI and not IDE, which really should be the default setting on current motherboards anyway.

But here is another question. Should I worry about updating the firmware in the SSD before I install the new system? It looks like I would do that through the Magician software. I think I could install Magician on an existing computer and then plug in the SSD and update the firmware, that way it would be ready to go for the new system. Is that a worthwhile exercise?

The computer will be a generic i7 on an Asrock motherboard with Win 7-64.

Wow, I popped back into this thread wanting the answer to this same question, and almost immediately found this. This may be the best info in this thread. I just got the Samsung 830 and I will be putting it in a brand new build shortly. Then, I started nosing around the web looking for info on using an SSD for the boot drive (which I have never done before) and what I saw was giving me a huge headache. There are pages and pages about all these steps that you are "supposed to do", like disabling the cache, disabling indexing, disabling system restore, and other assorted crap that I really don't want to mess with if it isn't necessary.

This is much more appealing to me:

Install OS, drivers, apps, etc.

Use computer.

I guess the one catch would be to make sure the Bios is set for AHCI and not IDE, which really should be the default setting on current motherboards anyway.

But here is another question. Should I worry about updating the firmware in the SSD before I install the new system? It looks like I would do that through the Magician software. I think I could install Magician on an existing computer and then plug in the SSD and update the firmware, that way it would be ready to go for the new system. Is that a worthwhile exercise?

The computer will be a generic i7 on an Asrock motherboard with Win 7-64.

If you're on Windows, run WEI. I thought the hard disk performance tests in WEI are what trigger Windows to detect an SSD and enable/disable necessary OS functions for optimal SSD usage.

If you do a clean install WEI does absolutely nothing. Not sure about cloning though, it might just make windows wake up that there is a SSD in some isolated cases. Unfortunately, I won't be testing this, the only clone i'll be making anytime soon is from SSD to SSD.

If you do a clean install WEI does absolutely nothing. Not sure about cloning though, it might just make windows wake up that there is a SSD in some isolated cases. Unfortunately, I won't be testing this, the only clone i'll be making anytime soon is from SSD to SSD.

Maybe it was the cloning process ... I thought I'd read it somewhere at some point. Or maybe I had to do it when I cloned the spinny disk in my wife's laptop to my Intel 320 as part of my rigs update to a larger disk, which was well over a year ago.

The WEI index is supposedly what triggers the decision to disable Superfetch and such -- the idea being that, if you had a really fast/low latency spinning disk, it should also be treated as an SSD. It's possible that the Windows installer runs the WEI test and doesn't record the number but does optimize the settings for it, but it just seems safer to run WEI yourself once you have your drivers installed.

The score can also be an easy red flag that you managed to screw up the install, since an improperly configured SSD almost always scores a 5.9.

Picked up a Kingston HyperX 3K 120gb for 70 and a Transend 128gb for 64 during Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Both are running great. The Transcend is running in a MBP with Sata 2. and the HyperX is in my desktop running at full speed.